Millions of dollars were spent by various companies to build application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) computers in an attempt to monopolize mining. These devices made it so GPUs and CPUs were no longer useful in the mining process. As a result, the vast majority of Bitcoin mining and transactions would now be processed by large data centers that required hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars in investment.

Now that Bitcoin computational power is handled almost entirely by large data centers, the currency has rapidly changed from a distributed, decentralized currency, to one that is much more centralized and vulnerable.